


Prodigal

by Millereflets



Category: Folklore - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Multi-Fandom, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Loki (Marvel) is Not Amused, Loki is a pilgrim, Loki is sort of an Endless, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, One Shot, Other, Self-Indulgent, Tricksters, Tricksters through Lore, Working Out My Feelings Through Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-08 14:14:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14695878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Millereflets/pseuds/Millereflets
Summary: Loki meets his aunt Death and embarks alone on a journey to walk back to who he had been.Unmoored as a lost ship, caught between the changing tides of his broken beliefs, Loki hopes that the God who he had called his brother for so long had found his way to that horribly boring group of frat boys.





	1. Family

The being, who was only sometimes known as Loki, opened his green eyes only to find the Endless Death looking over him with her dark, inscrutable stare, sitting still and quiet on a low hanging branch of a mossy tree, right over where he lay upon a heap of leaves and lichen, softened by rot. Loki could feel the damp chill of the wet vegetation and death curling around him.

All around them, the forest chirruped and dripped, full of life and decay. He sat up slowly and deliberately, subtly checking for the injuries that had sent him here in the first place. Satisfied that he carried none, with infinite care, he plucked out a leaf from his dark hair. 

He was remembering many things, not all of them pleasant.

“I have come close to your realm,” He said. His voice was soft and dark as always, and it pleased him. “But never inside it. Allow me to apologise for my miserable conduct as a nephew.”

“You _have_ been rather elusive, yes,” she told him. She had an ankh on her eye, and her hair was as black as him and her skin as pale. “But I think that had more to do with the general dislike of being dead rather than any remembrance of your true self.”

“I suppose so,” Loki grinned at her, his fingers twisting a piece of moss. “The soul stone seems to have reminded me of things best forgotten. Or not. No knowledge is detestable.”

“Many would not agree." Death sighed, a smile hidden in her tone. "I am glad you find it so, however."

Loki looked at his feet, clad in black boots. In his mind, a memory fluttered, of wingbeats under his feet and stars on his lips. "They called me Skywalker once." He murmured, more to himself than to her. "They were my sigil."

"Your father took your sigil after your indiscretions,” She spoke, soft and low, and if Loki was not what he was, he would have wanted to put his head back down and slept for a thousand years. But he only listened, not even a little heavy-eyed, a half-smile awakening in his jewel eyes. “I had told him that it was not a good thing to do. He broke you and banished you, and Odin, the nosey old God that he is, found you. Do you remember?”

Loki said nothing, and his face gave away nothing, except a tiny smile glimmering at the edge of his lips.

"But you have caused much mischief even after this", Death continued, frowning at the being. "So I don't suppose your nature had been much impacted." His stare remained easy and unwavering.She shrugged finally and hoped off the branch, and strolled over to stand next to him.

“How did Thanos come upon the soul stone?”, she asked.

“I supposed he asked one of his irksome children to locate it from the Nova Corps.” Loki told her, starting to stand. “Is it your sigil?”

“No,” Death said. “Only a gift to a very old lover. Not a very thoughtful one.”

Loki opened his mouth, as always about speak before thinking, but something, perhaps being dead, gave him a pause. 

“Did you know,” He asked her finally, unable to keep quiet, for not only was he mischievous, but also curious. “that this could have happened?”

“No,” she said sadly.

They stayed quiet then, the sound of water droplets splashing against leaves and wind hissing filling up the hollow silence.

“Well,” Death said after maybe days or weeks or only a handful of seconds. “It seems that there are no replacements for you at the moment.”

Loki smiled more broadly, canines sharp in the half-light, a dagger glinting in the shadow of his fist. He was not a seer, but he _was_  the God of Mischief and Lies and Stories and he heard from many ears, spoke through many mouths. He had kept safeguards and prepared, just a little, but enough.

“Are you sending me back?”, He asked her, suggestive and soft. No one could say no, no one had  _ever_ said no. 

But she only cocked her head at him, her expression faintly amused.

“Mischief,” she told him wryly, and upon hearing his true name, the green of his eyes flashed. “I have always found you very charming. As much as I would love to listen to your wishes, you do have a great many things to answer for, and to many. Your father, especially, had asked me to send you to him whenever you arrive.”

“I have nothing to say to him,” Loki said, hissing and growling, putting on a great show of wounded dignity. Inside, he felt fear slowly uncoil in his stomach. His father _may_ have finally discovered his coveted jewel was chipped. Fortunately, Loki thought he knew  _exactly_ where that had ended up.

“I have many things to ask you, however.” He told her, hoping to delay the ill-fated reunion, if only for a while. “We can start with the events of two—“

Death smiled, and even the Trickster was dazzled, if only a second. He blinked, and then scowled.

“Go now,” Death told him, gentle and firm.

Loki, or Mischief, as he was known to his family, sighed.

 


	2. Reaching out

The forest that he had met his aunt thinned around him as Loki leisurely wove his way through it. Soft mud, sounds of water, hanging lichen, and sparkling frogs slowly but steadily gave away to a grassy cliff, and as Loki gazed down from its edge, he could only see the rolling plain of multicoloured grass that stretched out to the horizon. It was almost mid morning, by the looks of the white-hot ball of gas that had almost reached the tip of the sky. Loki looked at it, his eyes stronger than most creatures that flew near stars, and wondered how long before the star had died. It seemed happy here in death, impersonating its duties right on schedule.

 _Stars are rather dull,_ he thought to himself, _always going on and going on about the absoluteness of their importance and—_ , and then caught the thought by its tail, surprised. Loki did not remember meeting any star. He certainly did not remember talking to one, so that he could profess an opinion about the topic of their conversation. Yet, the thought had felt as natural as any he had on a regular basis, from _Thor, stop being so obtuse about everything in the Universe,_ to _Oh dear, perhaps, I can help you into removing that annoying man in exchange for a little something._

Loki stopped admiring the scenery to briefly curse Thanos and the soul stone, as memories that were his own and yet not, shifted out of his reach, minnows under the surface of his thoughts.

Thanos had been a nuisance ever since Loki had the misfortune to meet him. Yet, even as he raged silently against the mad titan, Loki found he was, in ever so small amounts, was grateful to the Titan. After all, if Thanos had not nosed him out, and killed him with the soul stone blazing on his clenched fist, Loki would probably still be alive and festering in that Stark tower with Thor’s terrible friends glowering down at him. That is, if they had let him enter Earth at all without letting that two-penny wizard making him fall through the mirror dimension for an hour while Thor tried explain everything with his terrible communication skills.

Loki is still seethed over being outsmarted by the measly mortal. He would pay Stephen Strange a visit sometime. 

However, now that he was dead or at least in the realm of death, Loki was safely out of the way of Thanos, the Avengers and whoever might have decided to join the fray to battle it out. He was not forced to choose sides, betray them elaborately and risk being flayed alive by Thor or Thanos when he was found out. Of course there was the matter of explaining to his father what in the name of everything that had a name was the fragment of his emerald, (or was ita ruby? Loki could not quite remember) was doing out of the Dreaming. 

Loki scowled impressively, his brief moment of gratitude evaporating. _If Thanos had not these fantastical ideas of saving the Universe,_ he thought. But then many an idiot had these insane ideas about saving the Universe. The problem was that Thanos was simply mad enough and stupid enough to carry it out.

_Thanos, causing trouble anywhere he went. And Loki was called the Trickster God._ _His tricks were positively innocent in the light of Thanos's current course of action._

He did not remember his death well. Staring out to the undulating landscape, Loki could only barely recollect the small details of the instant he died; the feel of Thanos’s fingers around his throat, the promise he had made to Thor, the crinkle at the edge of the Titan’s mouth. He could not remember the breathless agony of strangulation, the creak of the bones as they shattered, the panic that death must always carry under her wings. They were only events that Loki knew had come to pass, not true experience—as if he had read them from a book. Dispassionate words that only existed as expressions.

Loki supposed it was a final gift for the ones who pass. But he had not passed, not truly. Perhaps it was given all who entered Death’s domain through violence.

He would not meet the true dead here. Loki remembered Odin who had dissolved over a sea of ice in his beloved Midgard, and Frigga, who Loki had doomed, the dead Aesir and Vanir, the hundreds that they had so foolishly thought they had rescued. The dead were gone, to wherever Death led them to. Some of them, he knew, he would meet again, in a different time and different place, with different faces and bodies. Some of them, he would see them as old acquaintances.

He was alone here now, not dead and not alive, alone with the truths the soul stone whispered to him as he died and unmoored as a lost ship, caught between the changing tides of his broken beliefs, hoping, that the God who Loki had called his brother for so long had found his way to that horribly boring group of frat boys.

 

…

The dark, volcanic rocks were coming loose under his shoes, and Loki, who had thought himself more graceful than most creatures that walked any realm, struggled to stay upright. He had torn a fingernail, trying to hold on when he really slipped off the broke slate lined path that led to the bottom of the mountain and edge of the plains. Now his hand throbbed. Thankfully, no one was around to witness the God of Lies slip and yelp and scramble.

He had died wearing the garb of the Aesir. It was generally comfortable, fitted and magically woven so that he was never too warm or never too cold. His boots had carried him, snug and padded, through battles, through Bifrost.

Right now, seemingly stripped of their magical properties, both of them had conspired against him. The layers were heavy on his skin, as he struggled to pick his way down—he could feel his skin radiate heat even in the shade. The perfect fit of his boots were tight and painful, his toes jammed into the its pointed tip. Loki knew for a fact, that his feet was going to be blistered before he even made it half way down.

He thought death would free him of such tedious mundane fact that, as far as he knew, only half-baked creatures had to deal with. Loki wanted to swear, but his tongue was dry and swollen with thirst. Loki did not feel thirst very often, and when he did, it was generally sated quickly. Unlike some, he believed in instant gratification.  _Living the moment,_ he liked to sneer. 

Right now, he wanted to unlive this moment as soon as possible. 

He almost fell twice before he decided it was time for a well-deserved break. His palms were scratched, and his knee ached where he had jammed it into a nook to arrest the uncontrolled descent.

Resting on a shallow shelf, he made his decision. Loki would not suffer such indignities.

In his eagle-skin, he flew, in slow, dizzying circles, riding the warm currents of the hot day under his great wings. He flew and flew, over the endless plains of strange grass and stranger plants, over vast expanses of utterly deserted land. Loki let the current drive him, without purpose or direction, flying out into the light, into the wild, and towards freedom from the self he had hated and loathed for so long.

 

... 

Loki sighed, and hissed as he gingerly touched his blistered feet. Adding to that, his arms were on fire from his extended flight, his skin felt burnt under the unrelenting light of the dead star that Death had coaxed into doing daylight duties, and the Asgardian attire was cumbersome in the burning day. Moreover, he was thirsty as a dry bone and hungry as a…Thor.

Loki was briefly satisfied at the choice of his metaphor. He beamed a little, as much as one can beam under such conditions.

He had flown into the freezing night, and into the dead of it, until he could fly no more. He had descended as the sky had started to lighten and changed to his Aesir form, and stumbled into a cottonwood cove, lightheaded with hunger and thirst. He had lapped and sucked the dew from the grass as best as he could, in the dark, half-lit hours between night and dawn, and lay on the frigid, wet grass shivering with cold and hunger.

And finally slept, dreamless and deep. When he woke, it was burning again, the deadly chill only a hazy memory in the back of his mind. Looking at the featureless, endless land around him, Loki now debated whether it was better to head out in the punishing heat, or simply to wait till the night came and he had to brave the equally unrelenting cold and the mists.

He thought being dead would free from such concerns. Little naive, he knew, remembering Death’s smile when she had waved him and his questions away. She was probably watching, and smiling in the folds of her cloak. Did she ever wear a cloak?

It was useless trying to remember through his fragmented recollections of being something that he had not been in a long time. 

But there had been a cloak. It dropped and dripped over the floor, with fire spitting from the hems to the darkness over it, twisting and shaping the nothingness, as the wearer turned. Weaving reality, shaping thought. He remembered a raven, and a pumpkin and disjointed snatches of songs that had drumbeats louder than the earthquakes from any of the Nine realms.

Loki did not know where he was going, moving only on instinct and patterns of the grass. As far as he could gather from his collection of snippets of who he used to be, that was the fastest way from where he was now to the Dreaming. Loki felt restless and disconcerted and against all his better judgement, decided to move, if only to dispel the itch that made him want to step out of this skin. 

 

He had cast spells on his feet, of healing and resilience, but the magic did not take well. It sputtered and shimmered under his arcing fingers, and it almost took him an hour before his feet were reasonably repaired, and he could walk again without the feeling of knives in his feet. 

He walked the better part of the day, hands in his pockets, rivulets of sweat running everywhere, a lone strider in an empty land, letting his thoughts drift out to the ocean of his mind, hoping they would be drawn from the fact that his feet had started to bleed in his spell-crafted boar-hide Asgardian boots. He was so thirsty. He probably would not die of either hunger or thirst, but he suffered, his lips cracked and his throat unable to given swallow.

When the sun went down, an utterly unimpressive sunset with no nuance in Loki’s opinion, he sat down in the vastness, crunching the grass under. He sat with each hand curled around a knee, and Loki cast his mind back to the dustiest corners to his being and shifted around for the elusive spirit of whom the stone had murmured, more frustrated and excited than he had been in a thousand years. As the cold descended around him, biting and snapping, Loki lay back, and watched stars which were all dead somewhere, blooming upon the purple sky like grass flowers.

He did not know when his eyes slid closed, but when he opened them again, he lay under a white sky, upon white sand that was slid under his fingers like crushed bones. Identical to a spur of granite, a fortress rose in the distant, non-existent horizon, as flat as everything around him.

Loki grinned wide, even as his lips split open, and he tasted blood. He had arrived.

**Author's Note:**

> So, in the wake of the devastation that Infinity Wars is, I was thinking of how could possibly Loki come back. As an avid fan of the Sandman comics, my mind immediately went to the Endless. And this idea popped! 
> 
> Who do you think is his mum and dad among the Endless? 
> 
> This is currently a one-shot, but if people want, I might expand this into a full-length fic about Loki's coming back to the land of the Living and his journey of rediscovery through the dimensions the Endless inhabit. He has a great many things to remember. 
> 
> Please comment below and tell me your thoughts!


End file.
